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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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In an endeavor to safeguard what it regarded as the
Qur'anic concept of divine omnipotence, the dominant
school of Islamic theology (kalām), founded by al-
Ash'arī (d. 935), adopted the occasionalist doctrine that
causal efficacy resides exclusively with the divine will.
The Ash'arites denied the concept of “natural” causa-
tion, that is, that action proceeds from an existent's
very nature or essence. They thus rejected the Aris-
totelian concept of natural efficient causality, subject-
ing it to criticism on logical and empirical grounds.
They also rejected Aristotle's theory of eternal matter,
advocating a metaphysics of contingent atoms and
accidents that are created ex nihilo, combined to form
bodies, and sustained in temporally finite spans of
existence by direct divine action. Accordingly, the
orderly flow of these events has no inherent necessity,
being no more than a habit ('āda), decreed arbitrarily
by the divine will. Hence when God creates a miracle,
that is, when He disrupts the habitual course of nature,
no contradiction obtains. As for human volitions, acts,
and cognitions, the Ash'arites regarded these also as
temporal events (ḥawādith), the direct creation of God.

This doctrine, held with individual modifications,
became widely accepted and represents the most dis-
tinctively Islamic causal concept. The history of its
development reflects two main phases: (1) an early
phase where it is primarily concerned with doctrinal
questions within kalām; (2) a later phase, initiated by
Ghazali (al-Ghazālī; d. 1111), where it directs itself


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more explicitly against the necessitarian metaphysics
of the Islamic Neo-Platonists, Alfarabi (al-Fārābī; d.
950) and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā; d. 1037).